Friday, October 2, 2009

Arora 0.10.0!

Source and Windows binary packages (with Qt 4.5.3) are available on arora-browser.org. OS X binaries will be up later tonight. Kubuntu/Ubuntu users will find packages in Karmic shortly.

First off a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net

Jakub Wieczorek faw217@gmail.com

Diego Iastrubni elcuco@kde.org

Christopher Eby kreed@kreed.org

Kristof Bal kristof.bal@gmail.com

Tor Arne Vestbø tor.arne.vestbo@nokia.com

Tom Gundersen teg@jklm.no

John Wimer john@god.vtic.net

Jocelyn Turcotte jocelyn.turcotte@nokia.com

Jakub Lužný limoto94@gmail.com

Gegesy Zsombor gzsombor@gmail.com

Christian Franke cfchris6@ts2server.com

axasia axasia@gmail.com

0.10.0 has a lot of improvements, many of which have been blogged about the past few weeks. The biggest two are the addition of AdBlock and password saving / wallet. While browsers like Konqueror and Opera let the user block things manually, Arora might be the first browser to ship with a subscription blocking system and not as an extra install. [See below were a user will comment about the browser that had adblock subscriptions all the way back in the 90's] These days many browsers are funded by companies that are ad based in one form or another such as Firefox and Chrome who are funded by Google. As Arora is not funded by an ad based company we can happily incorporate features like ad blocking and Flash blocking to give our users what they want while Firefox and Chrome can never add those features.

We went through and implemented a lot of older issues. For those of you with Google accounts the issues are sorted by the number of stars a issue has so if you find a bug/feature important click the star on the left to vote for it so we know what you find important.

After getting directory listing in the last release we got a nice little patch that adds the ability to hide and show hidden files when browsing a directory.

Two older feature requests, #40 and #85 add support for keyboard shortcuts on the location bar such as ctrl-enter to append .com. If there are keyboard shortcuts that you expected Arora to have, but did not find open a issue and we will see what we can do.

The full changelog:

0.10.0Interface- Issue #24: Add support for AdBlock- Issue #40: Support several common modifiers in the location bar for modifying the typed in url. ctrl-enter - append .com ctrl-shift-enter - append .org shift-enter - append .net- Issue #79: Trap tab key to cycle through potential URLs in the location bar.- Issue #85: Alt+Enter on the location bar opens the url in a new tab.- Issue #119: Add Password Management / AutoFill- Issue #411: Save and restore the tab back/forward history- Issue #630: Limit download progress updates to 5 per second to reduces CPU use from 18% to 3% when downloading.- Issue #650: Save the toolbar location allowing the toolbars to be next to each other- Add ctrl-z shortcut to undo the closing of the last tab.- Behave better when access keys are enabled by adding a slight delay to make sure that the ctrl is actually for access keys and not for another shortcut such as ctrl-tab or ctrl-a- When arora crashed on the previous startup give the user a way to bypass the failsafe and restore their session if they really want.- Add the ability to set the length of a session cookie- Enable DNS prefetching and WebKit version in the about dialog when building against Qt 4.6.- Remember what tab you were on when you close the settings dialog- Add a browse button next to the style sheet line edit to help users find files and automatically translate them into url's.- Add icons to the menu actions on freedesktop systems.- Show the configure search engines action in the tools menu- Change default bookmarks to only have a link to htpp://arora-browser.org Removed all of Qt development type entries From discussion on http://arorabrowser.blogspot.com/2009/08/arora-090.html and also the Kubuntu guys strip the bookmarks in their release so it make sense.- Move the Preferences menu item to Tools/Options- Set placeholder text for the start page search box- Add a checkbox to hide/show hidden files in the directory listing.- Change the about dialog text so it can be selected with a mouse so users can copy the application version.- Allow urls to be dropped on the bookmark bar and bookmark menu

Behind the scenes- Force the history completer to be LTR: same as the url line.- Create a new stills class, NetworkAcessManagerProxy that is useful for tracking what QWebPage a QWebReply came from.- Load QWebView settings when the View is created so m_enableAccessKeys will be read from settings- Rename lineedit -> locationbar functions & variables- Enhance SingleApplication so that the host can send messages back to the second application. On Windows this is used to send the window id back to the application that was just started so it can raise the arora window to the front.- Fix some old MSVC compile warnings- Make it possible to retranslate the bookmarks toolbar title- Set the maximumPagesInCache to 3 (default is 0) and provide a way for users to set this value through QSettings.- Add a path from the users directory to the locale search path- Added RTL support for the start page- Add support for multiple directories to LanguageManager.- Fix the naming of the QAction m_toolsEnableInspector to m_toolsEnableInspectorAction to be consistent with the rest of the code- Add new TreeSortFilterProxyModel class to utils that will only filter child nodes in a QAbstractItemModel. (under the BSD license)- Rename getConfigFile to dataFilePath- Rename dataDirectory to installedDataDirectory to give a much better description of what it does- Add missing drop functionality to the ModelMenu class. The implementation is symetric to the ModelToolBar class.- ModelMenu can now accept drops (both moving and copying) and can apply them to the underlying model.- Refactor BookmarksToolBar by making it inherit from ModelToolBar.- Add new ModelToolBar class, that is a subclass of QToolBar and an equivalent of ModelMenu for toolbars. It can be used to populate a toolbar with actions based on a given model.- Fix character encoding in directory listing.- Clean up the private browsing message box to make it easier to translate.

Build system- Allow building against a shadow-built WebKit trunk- Ignore more misc generated build files on windows- Add Git hook to check commits for the proper copyright year- Ignore the doc directory which is generated by doxygen- Check for spaces at the start and end of an expression- Re-enable sharing the temporary compilation objects for all subprojects. Use the 'ordered' configuration to make sure that we walk through the subdirectories one by one and not all simultaneously when building in parallel.